Corona@home

[lolec]

Owning a computer does not make sense for a big percentage of people. Just like owning a car will soon stop to make sense.

It's like installing a coffee maker for each person in the office, there is a huge computational potential that's just wasted :(

There are a few programs like SETI@HOME, Folding@Home or GIMPS that harness idle computing power to calculate some extraordinary stuff...

Now, I've used renderfarm services and I know "distribuiting" a render is not easy, you need to send the whole scene...

But I'm wondering, is there some part of the render work that can be easily distributed among other corona users?

I'm not saying exactly what a renderfarm does, it's most definitely not practical.  I know enough to understand why this idea sounds stupid, but not enough to be sure is completely impossible.

MAYBE there is some number crunching that takes a lot of computational resources and could be shared? Maybe corona users can rent their idle machine in some way?

Is that even possible?

[FrostKiwi]

Maybe corona users can rent their idle machine in some way?

This was suggested before. Blender has a community driven render farm, that rebranded itself edit: just noticed sheep it and http://renderfarm.fi/ are not the same devs, to Sheep it renderfarm.
It used to run on boinc (the alternative to folding@home), but there were many hurdles to overcome.
I recall boinc sometimes getting stuck in a never ending loop of redownloading a project. Eventually with all the donation money they coded a Java Applet to do the distribution.

All in all this is a massive undertaking, that only worked, because blender had all the feature set in it's own software.

With Max this is not possible, due to fragmentation of scripts used, plugins used, version differences etc.. Even if you could get standalone to run in such a community driven way, it does not solve for Max still being so individual on every Worksstation.

And that is disregarding Dev costs, dev time, huge delays between render submit, render start and final return, that is better spent making Corona better.

Although... you can give it a shot :P

[Tanakov]

Well, I see potential use of this even if that might mean some delays, yet integration would be pain in the ass

[FrostKiwi]

some delays

That is quite the stretchable term ;D

I recall with the boinc based blender http://renderfarm.fi/, that it would take two hours until your request was added to the queue. With it being free, it was sometimes a very very long wait once it was even added.
For the last frames to trickle in it took sometimes almost a week, where for some magic reasons clients would drop and a timeout period half an hour was needed for the frame to be requeued.

Maybe this is better now with sheep-it, but distributing to random nodes over slow ass internet with nodes that would regularly drop out, causing a reshuffling of data results in FAR bigger delays than the word "some" could encompass.

This stuff needs to be centralized, like your traditional render farm, only then it works properly.

[Tanakov]

Yeah but then who will take charge? its pretty much clear that people would like this but, nobody will take care of it ;)